The son of the poets
Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath has taken his own life, 46 years after his mother
gassed herself while he slept.

Nicholas Hughes
hanged himself at his home in Alaska after battling against depression for some
time, his sister Frieda said yesterday.

He was 47, unmarried
with no children of his own and had until recently been a professor of
fisheries and ocean sciences at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Dr Hughes’s death
adds a further tragic chapter to a family history that has been raked over with
morbid fascination for two generations.

He was only a baby
when his mother died but she had already sketched out what he meant to her in
one of her late poems.

In Nick and the Candlestick, published in her posthumous
collection Ariel, she wrote: “You are the one/ Solid the spaces lean on, envious./ You are the baby
in the barn.”

Later his father
wrote of how, after Plath’s death, their son’s eyes“Became wet jewels,/ The
hardest substance of the purest pain/ As I fed him in his high white chair”.Neither
he, nor his sister nor their Poet Laureate father could ever fully escape the
shadow cast by Plath’s suicide in 1963 and the personality cult that then
sprang up around her memory.

Ted Hughes was
hounded for the rest of his life by feminists and Plath devotees who accused
him of driving her to her death by his infidelity.

In 1969 he suffered
another terrible loss when his mistress gassed herself and their daughter in an
apparent copycat suicide.

Plath’s friend, the
poet and critic Al Alvarez, once said: “I would love to think that the
culture’s fascination is because Plath is a great and major poet, which she is.
But it wouldn’t be true. It is because people are wildly interested in scandal
and gossip.”

Her turbulent
marriage to Hughes became a modern myth, from their first meeting at Cambridge
where he kissed the young American Fulbright scholar “bang smash on the mouth”
and she bit his cheek so hard that it bled, through the whirlwind secret
wedding all the way to its catastrophic ending.

Plath’s suicide in
effect froze her children in time so that in the public memory they remained a
one-year-old and a two-year-old lying in their cots, carefully sealed off from
the gas leaking over their mother in the room next door.

Hughes did everything
that he could to shield them from the increasingly lurid interest in their
mother and did not tell them that she had killed herself until they were
teenagers.

Frieda Hughes
reemerged into the public gaze in her twenties when her first children’s book
was published. She has also been a successful artist, poet and newspaper
columnist and has spoken and written about her parents and her own own
struggles with depression, ME and anorexia.

Her brother never
resurfaced in the same way, but his life had also moved on. A family friend
said last night: “Nick wasn’t just the baby son of Plath and Hughes and it
would be wrong to think of him as some kind of inevitably tragic figure. He was
a man who reached his mid-forties, an adventurous marine biologist with a
distinguished academic career behind him and a host of friends and achievements
in his own right. That is the man who is mourned by those who knew him.”

Frieda Hughes was
travelling to Alaska yesterday but said in a statement: “It is with profound
sorrow that I must announce the death of my brother, Nicholas Hughes, who died
by his own hand on Monday 16th March 2009 at his home in Alaska. He had been
battling depression for some time.”

He was an
evolutionary ecologist who specialised in the study of stream fish and
travelled thousands of miles across Alaska on research trips.

“His lifelong
fascination with fish and fishing was a strong and shared bond with our father
(many of whose poems were about the natural world). He was a loving brother, a
loyal friend to those who knew him and, despite the vagaries that life threw at
him, he maintained an almost childlike innocence and enthusiasm for the next
project or plan.”

Shortly before his
death, he left his post at the university to set up a pottery at home and
“advance his not inconsiderable talent at making pots and creatures in clay”.

Although there is
acceptance that depression can be inherited, there is no known suicide gene
that could connect Dr Hughes's death to his mother’s.

Paul Farmer, the
chief executive of Mind, the mental health charity, said: “Suicide is a much
more complicated event than simply being a question of genetics, but there is
some evidence that if a member of your family has taken their life there can be
a higher risk of people doing the same. However, it is often absolutely to do
with what’s happening in the here and now rather than any urge that is more
deeply rooted.”

Dr Hughes’s parents
split up before he was 1, his father leaving Plath for Assia Wevill, the exotic
wife of another poet. The winter that followed was unrelentingly harsh.
Struggling to get by on very little money as a single parent with two young
children, Plath’s fragile mental state collapsed. She wrote many of her finest
poems in a final burst of creativity and killed herself early one February
morning.

Six years later
Wevill, who had lived with Hughes and the children for much of the intervening
period, also gassed herself. It was March 23, 1969 – 40 years ago today – and
her death differed from Plath’s in one appalling respect: she had murdered
four-year-old Shura in the process.

To the frustration of
biographers, Hughes stayed silent about his own response to these events until
almost the end of his life. Then, in 1995, he published half a dozen poems that
he had written for Wevill, hidden among the 240 poems in his New Selected Poems.

In 1998 he finally
unveiled in Birthday Letters a series of 88 poems
examining his life with Plath and his reaction to her death. Serialised in The Times, the poems recast his reputation from a man who had shown no apparent
contrition for his wife’s fate into something far more complex.

In a letter to the poet
Kathleen Raine he said he wished that he had published them earlier. “I might
have had a more fruitful career – certainly a freer psychological life.”

Hughes dedicated Birthday Letters to his children. Unusually for a book
of poetry, it became a runaway best-seller, shifting more than 150,000
hard-back copies in Britain alone. He did not live to see it awarded the 1999
Whitbread Book of the Year award, as he died of cancer the previous October. It
was Frieda, not Nicholas, who accepted the prize on his behalf.